November

Around the world recipes

See our recipe supplement, which came free with British Baker on 1 Dec, for a selection of great commercially scaled-up recipes from around the world.
We featured some top names from TV chef Paul Rankin (pictured) to bakery writer Richard Bertinet and chocolatier Trevor Backhouse.
From Irish soda bread to French pain de campagne, Indonesian salmon baguette to Italian slipper pizza, the recipes will give you the new ideas you need to tempt your customers.

Where do you go if you want the true taste of the south-west, to find a proper Cornish pasty made to a traditional recipe, with locally sourced ingredients, a rich handmade pastry and produced locally? Well, London obviously.

The Café Brontë brand of luxury cookies, indulgent biscuits and traditional shortbread bars was launched at London's Caffè Culture show in late May and has already secured listings with two out of three of the country's leading wholesalers. And according to the Livingston firm's managing director Alan Hardie: "We expect all three to have the brand by the end of the year."

Belfast-based Neill's Flour has become the first mill in Northern Ireland to receive the Investor in People Standard, joining over 38,000 organisations in the UK that have committed to setting a level of good practice for improving business performance through their people.

While the quality of the UK wheat harvest in 2006 has been generally good, events elsewhere in the world have led to a steep increase in wheat prices, especially during September and early October. The upshot is that UK bread wheat prices now stand some 40% higher than a year ago and this market strength seems likely to persist throughout this season.

In the last month the three biggest retail bakers in the UK - Three Cooks, Lyndale Foods and Greggs - have all hit the headlines. Most recently, Three Cooks has crashed into administration, but before that Greggs complained of disappointing trading. Lyndale has also admitted a major strategic review is under way.

At last, there are signs on the horizon of a few brave bakers who have noticed things are hotting up on the high street! Apart from the giants, such as Greggs and Subway, making their presence felt, retail bakers face the added challenge of the in-store concessions, bake-off and any number of coffee-based offers. But many have their blinkers on, focusing just on their products while neglecting the bigger picture.

The 2006 International Conference of Dried Grape Producing Countries was held in Monterey, California last month. Representatives from countries, including the USA, Turkey, Greece, Chile, South Africa and Australia, swapped information on harvests, production and marketing at the event.

After we broke the news last week of another impending rise in the price of flour many of you have remarked that both British and Canadian wheat harvests were very good, therefore it is hard to believe that other factors would have such an adverse effect on prices.

These tasty orange biscuits come from a collection of 215 recipes compiled by a professional baker, Fredrick Vine, in his book Biscuits for Bakers: Easy to Make and Profitable to Sell, which was published in 1896. He recommended selling these biscuits at 1 shilling a pound. In today's terms that's about £8 for a kilo or £3.90 a pound.

RTS Flexible Systems (Irlam, Manchester) a provider of integrated robotic and automation systems for the food industry, has developed a solution for picking and packing food products into variety packs.

Macphie is helping bakers during the festive season with a range of convenient, ready-to-use desserts and sweet sauces. The desserts include Macphie Crème Caramel, Macphie Panna Cotta and Macphie Crème Brûlée. The desserts are tolerant to alcohol making them suitable for Christmas products.

California Raisins (Barnes, London) is launching an Organic Food Bar range. The bars are non-dairy kosher and three are vegan-certified. All are vegetarian, dairy-free, gluten-free, peanut-free, soy-free and GMO-free, with no preservatives, additives, salt, coatings or refined sugar. The RRP is £1.99.

Elisabeth the Chef reports significant growth in packaged cakes over the last year, with sales growth topping the 20% mark. The company states that almost all that growth stems from traditional product areas - choux buns, meringue-based products, doughnuts, éclairs, custards and sponges.

Health and indulgence are two buzzwords that have peppered many a bakery marketing director's PowerPoint presentation over the past year. But while the indulgent cakes sector continues to show great gains, healthy cake sales are somewhat stagnant.

Unifine Food & Bake Ingredients' Centre of Excellence in Roosendaal, Holland, claims to be able to create any flavour, bringing 150 years of experience to the table. Well-trained panel members, selected for their sense of taste and smell, are crucial to the flavours business. The sensory labs, in which they operate, looks like a scene from a science fiction film, as the experts sniff away in their small, white, square booths. They have their own unique 'flavour language', developed so that they can communicate smells and tastes objectively, which includes words such as metallic, violet, musky, woody, vanillic and even catty!

Bakery buyers may be sobbing in the aisles - and one or two tertiary bakery suppliers, no doubt - as the one-size-fits-all approach to filling the supermarket bakery concessions across the land is ditched, with the focus shifted onto locally sourced products, premium, indulgent products and organics.